The Bush regime may be playing fast and loose with international law and constitutional rights, but at least it knows where it's going. The anti-war movement is a case of the blind leading the blind.

How about some blatant contradictions in the reasoning it used to try to stop war?

Let's continue sanctioning Iraq, even if the movement itself claims that half a million Iraqi children died because of sanctions. So a slow death, of far greater numbers of people, is preferable to a quick war to remove the main irritant?

Or let's admit that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were a threat to his own people and his neighbors and ask that the U.N. inspections regime continue. This, despite the movement's distrust of the U.N. as instrument of American empire, and its avowed defense of national sovereignty.

Or how about protesting the war for fear that it may lead to terrorist reprisals by the enraged and humiliated Arab mob - precisely the blatant stereotyping the anti-war movement claims to be against

(...)

Doesn't mocking Bush's simplicity increase support for him among constituencies that do not have a problem per se with exertion of American power abroad, and stricter enforcement of law and order at home?

Do Chomsky, Zinn, and Ehrenreich have any vision for the future, for the exercise of American power (since it won't simply disappear by leftist say-so), other than a purely negative one?

Judging by the ad hoc rationales the movement has chosen to sustain itself, it would appear that above all things it is afraid of power. And that seems to be a curious position to be in for domestic opponents of empire

(...)

The anti-war movement should support regime change not just in Iraq (or Syria or Iran) but in fifty or sixty mostly Muslim countries that are tyrannical and abusive of basic human rights. Of course, war should not be the instrument of bringing about regime change in these countries, but a range of power instruments needs to be directed against nations that suppress liberty.

If Wolfowitz and the neoconservatives were actually right about why American power is being exercised in Iraq and elsewhere (to liberate the peoples of these nations), then there would be nothing wrong in principle with this approach. The anti-war movement should stop giving the impression of preferring the status quo, with dictators ruling half the world.

(...)

The anti-war movement should not strike a morally unsustainable posture by linking up with the inconsistent anti-globalization movement (another historic failure, if measured by actual accomplishment rather than verbal bombast).

An extreme degree of patronization toward peoples of the third world is involved in the professional protester's appropriation of the right to speak on behalf of the voiceless of the world. Why shouldn't Iraqis and Iranians and Egyptians have access to the same rights we have taken for granted? Why shouldn't any means possible - short of wanton destruction - be used to bring about this state of affairs?

Why shouldn't patriotism, meaning the belief in the best that America represents, become a force for global good again?

"A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom."F.A.Hayek